INTRODUCTION

In a Discourse of Civill Life (1606), Lodowick Bryskett, the former clerk to the
council in Ireland, had retired to a cottage on the outskirts of Dublin, where a
group of colleagues or friends arrived in order to discuss the active life and the
broader question of civility or civil education. Brysketts visitors included, amongst
others, the archbishop of Armagh, Dr John Long , the poet Edmund Spenser, the
army captains Warham St Leger and Christopher Carleil, and the Irish councillor
Sir Robert Dillon. Brysketts account of this meeting served as a literary device in
order to set the scene for his dialogue, though it reflects something of the reality
of his Irish life.1 It also parallels a similar event in England where Humphrey Gilbert, an English explorer, who had seen military service in Ireland, met to discuss
the work of the Roman historian Livy with Sir Thomas Smith, a leading legal
scholar and diplomat, and also Gabriel Harvey, Spensers mentor.2
In both accounts an idea of Ireland is instrumental. The discussion Gilbert
and Smith had over civil society was largely theoretical, but it was Gilberts Irish
experience and Smiths plan to colonize part of Ulster that led them to critique
Livy. In the more settled environment of Elizabethan England the potential
scope for remaking civil society was limited. Similarly, for Bryskett and his colleagues or friends, their engagement with ideas about civility and mans reform
had immediate practical implications. Elizabeths Irish kingdom was in a condition of perceived widespread civil disorder and the question of the islands
longer-term reform dominated discussion for most of Elizabeths reign.
Irelands great Old English lords headed large clientage networks. These
networks formed the basis of semi-independent military forces, which allowed
these lords to govern their lordships according to their own will. In Irelands
Gaelic lordships, English law and landholding practice were ignored and instead
these lords governed their followers according to Gaelic customary norms, thus
claiming an independent sovereign jurisdiction. Alongside this, within Irelands
Old English gentry community, governments attempts to raise some form of tax
met with increasingly vocal protests; whilst Irish medieval Catholicism, in its
different forms, was thought deviant, with such criticism only intensifying with
the perceived need for protestant reform. Ireland, then, was an arena where Eng-

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lish political thought, where English ideas over the nature of civil society, came
to be practically applied in a heated and unstable environment. Ireland, more so
than England, would shape the intellectual trajectory of Elizabethan political
thought, where political violence and rebellion were commonplace.
Within Irish government correspondence quite a precocious shift in ideas
and vocabulary can be identified. Bryskett, Spenser, Long and St Leger were
part of a wider Calvinist or reformed protestant grouping that staffed Irish government. Such a grouping also included Lord Deputy Henry Sidney and his
chancellor Robert Weston, Lord Deputies Arthur Grey and John Perrot, and
provincial administrators such as Edward Fitton, Richard Bingham and William
Herbert. Their counterparts in England included William Cecil (Lord Burghley), Sir Francis Walsingham and the earl of Leicester.3 Leicester supported the
appointment of various lord deputies including his brother-in-law Henry Sidney.4 Here the idea of civility or reform that was outlined did not simply involve
civil education, but an idea of godly reform.
The network of reformed protestants in England sought a more fully reformed
church, where medieval liturgy would be dispensed with and more importantly
Gods word fully preached. This encompassed a notion of renewal, whereby society would come to be in communion with God once it had fully shaken off the
spiritual darkness of the medieval church.5 In many ways, the question of Irish
civil disobedience drew out the full detail of an English godly vision for society,
which remained more contained within the more settled environment of Elizabethan England; whilst Ireland provided an arena further away from conservative
intervention by Elizabeth giving godly protestants something of a free hand. A
connection was drawn between the dissemination of Gods word, the operation of
grace and the reform of individual consciences, which, it was argued, would establish true obedience and godly political relationships. As a result the preaching
of God's word was thought of as a principal component in Irish political reform.
Beside this, however, by 1578 quite a startling shift in vocabulary began to take
place. Within Irish government correspondence an early and marked use of the
term the state can be identified. The term had been used to refer to the state or
condition of the island; but policy discussion came to be framed in terms of the
need to maintain the sovereign authority and institutions of the state. Here Irish
government drew on language and ideas we would associate with the Italian republican thought of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, or the absolutism of Bodin. The use
of term state, moreover, predated developments in England by around a decade
or so and was conceptually advanced. Its deployment gave tentative shape to the
two principal assumptions associated with a modern abstract notion of the state,
expressing both the idea that the authority of government was absolute and so distinct from the wider polity, and the idea that such authority was distinct from the
person of the prince and so inherent in the institutions or offices of government.6

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Introduction

This raises an important set of questions which form the backbone of this
study. Why had this set of Irish reformers suddenly turned to discuss the maintenance of secular state institutions, as opposed to furthering godly reform? Why
had Irish government decided to deploy a new non-godly vocabulary? It is in
attempting to answer these questions that the study seeks to re-evaluate the connection between protestant thought and the emergence of statist ideas, as well as
re-examining English protestant involvement in Irish government.
The study starts from the position that there is a need to re-consider reformation thought, its political implications and a subsequent need to conceptualize
the state. It also sees Ireland as an important case study in such an investigation,
where various English and European ideas about good government and civil life
were exposed to open discussion because these models broke down in Ireland
due to stress and strain. Such a shift in ideas compels us to reassess the impact of
protestant thought on Irish government, where within Irish historical scholarship a link has been drawn between the idea of original sin and a more coercive
position, which ignores in its entirety the protestant evangelical motive.7 More
importantly, it raises questions about a tendency within modern scholarship
to treat the emergence of an idea of the state within a strictly political sphere,
where an emerging statist position simply involved constitutional rights and the
position of sovereignty within the community. Do we not need to address a preceding notion of Christian friendship- and grace-based political relationships
which had begun to break down?

Gods Grace and Civil Life

To begin with, there is a tendency within modern scholarship to downplay or sidestep the implications reformation thought had for established views of normative
political relationships, where an emphasis within reformed theology on sin, grace
and individual conscience challenged a whole set of notions about the perfectibility of man. Quite a modern notion of civic or political life pervades English and
European historiography where the political space is viewed as an area in which
man could seek his betterment (whatever that might entail). Here writing on protestant political thought in England, Margo Todd argues that Christian humanism
remained to the fore that protestants of all sorts adopted the hope of catholic
humanists like Erasmus for a godly social order established through education and
discipline.8 Similarly, Markku Peltonen, in discussing the broader basis for English political thinking, argues that civic humanism and an active republicanism
informed how the Elizabethans thought about the political community.9
However, if a protestant conception of Gods word and grace is re-examined,
the emphasis on the continuity between a humanist and a protestant position
does begin to break down. In the first place, there is a sharp divide between an
Erasmian view of mans reform and that held by Luther or Calvin. For Erasmus

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Gods word is educative, whereby mans intellect responds to the good news of
the Gospel, grace then meeting the intellect halfway and helping to perfect man.
In contrast, for protestants the intellect has very little to contribute. Instead,
Gods word acts through grace (as an aspect of Gods will) reforming mans conscience, thus bringing man to know God and what is good.10 Such a position
rests upon a completely different conception of man, where through the Fall
mans will is fully corrupt, where man cannot contribute anything towards his
own redemption thus it is by the action of grace alone (regardless of intellect)
that man is reformed.11 In these terms grace should be seen as the redemptive
power of Gods love, expressing each individuals direct relationship with God
unmediated through church or priest.
This begins to suggest that ideas around civic life and active virtue could become
highly contested; and part of the misinterpretation of protestant thought stems
from a misreading of what an emphasis on Gods word implies. It is too readily
assumed that Gods word, and the establishment of a preaching ministry, expresses
a straightforward educative enterprise, when in fact it invokes a completely different grace-based category or idea of reform and wider relationships. Beside this the
establishment of a preaching ministry is usually treated as an entirely religious concern, when in fact the dissemination of Gods word was viewed as a critical factor
in the reform of man and the construction of a godly political order, where, once
redeemed, subjects and citizens would naturally act for the wider good.12 This
in turn points to a series of potential problems because of the various difficulties
encountered in England and more so in Ireland when it came to the construction
of a functional church. This raised questions about whether a man who lacked
grace might in fact be capable of acting well (especially if Gods word had not been
widely preached). How did such a position affect notions about the unity of a
Christian polity ? How did reformed protestants respond if they thought Gods
grace was absent from political life, and how could protestants judge the internal
disposition of individual citizens or subjects? Moreover, to what extent was a modern notion of the state conditioned by such problems?

European State Theory

When we consider the broader pattern of developments set out in Quentin Skinners Foundations of Modern Political Thought, where a statist discussion is seen
as emerging, in part, out of a discussion begun by protestant resistance theorists
over their right to act against the ruler, a godly dimension does seem to be at
play. This raises the question as to what exactly a notion of the state is meant to
do. For Skinner, as for Todd and Peltonen, there is nothing distinctly Calvinist
about the political thinking of reformed protestants. For Skinner the reformation provided a context that required protestants to reconsider, reformulate and
redeploy an earlier medieval vocabulary; it did not add any new ideas or new jus-

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tifications for political action.13 Resistance theorists simply pillaged a medieval

heritage, which dealt with notions of popular sovereignty and the rights of inferior magistrates, in order to justify arming themselves against an ungodly ruler.
But what should we make of the fact that protestants tended to adhere to the
idea of the mixed polity, whereby sovereign authority was seen as being shared
throughout the political community, thus providing inferior magistrates with the
right to act against the ruler? A mixed polity was thought to consist of aspects
of three forms of government, democracy, aristocracy and monarchy, with sovereign authority being shared between each estate. After all, for Calvin a mixed
polity was the best form of government in a godly society, where magistrate and
preacher should work together in order to preserve and strengthen a godly order.
In effect, the best form of church government was the best form of civil government. Calvin even referred to such a conjunction of ideas as a Christian polity.14
This suggests that a notion of grace and godly friendship may have been
more instrumental in such thinking, where the community was brought into
direct communion with God and as a consequence all were mandated to work
together in the building up of Gods kingdom. That in contrast with a more
hierarchical model, where the prince simply upholds a Christian order, a godly
community required a political structure that allowed all to participate in political life because grace brought all to act well and mandated that all serve God.
However, this is by no means simple, because in a broader European debate,
a more directly political or practical outlook can be argued to have been in play.
In France, Huguenots adopted such a view in order to argue for freedom of worship within a kingdom that was predominantly catholic.15 In England, such a view
underlay what Patrick Collinson terms the monarchical republic, where Elizabeths
more convinced protestant councillors argued for a right to a voice in government
in order to insist that more church reform was necessary, this being conditioned
by local self-governing gentry republics as found in Englands villages and towns.16
In contrast, it was the French catholic writer Jean Bodin in his Six Books of the
Commonwealth who adopted an absolutist position, arguing that sovereignty as an
indivisible power had to be located within a particular estate in society, and preferably with the prince, thus undermining the mixed polity which saw sovereignty
as being shared throughout the community. Bodin adopted his view in order to
unpick Huguenot arguments, which he saw destabilizing civil society.17
In relation to a specifically Irish context, this raises an awkward question,
because those protestants involved in Irish government came to adopt an absolutist
definition of sovereign authority (as delegated to them), thus denying the validity
of the various customary rights of Elizabeths Irish subjects. In doing so, not only did
Irish government adhere to a position it knew to be antithetical in wider European
protestant thought; in England these individuals held the opposite view, supporting adamantly a mixed polity position. Part of the answer to such a question lies

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in properly reconsidering the theological context surrounding the development of

statist thought. In fact, the inversion of the usual pattern found in European political debate helps us examine such a link, because it demands that we reconsider
the relationship between a protestant view of civil society and an emerging state
theory. It demands that we consider how notions of grace-based friendship, which
linked the polity together, relate to a set of institutional structures.
Interestingly, in this regard, J. G. A. Pocock argues in The Machiavellian
Moment that Italian republican writing, in a pre-reformation context, was
responding to the failure of a radical vision of redemption and reform to materialize in Florence as offered by Savonarola. Here the state and its institutions
emerge as an alternative basis for a political community in a context where it
was no longer possible to think of citizens being guided by knowledge of the
summum bonum, namely God, and therefore naturally acting for the good of the
community.18 In particular, a notion of fortuna was deployed in order to describe
the disorderly nature of the temporal political sphere when a clear providential vision for society was lacking. A focus on external state institutions, then,
allowed those involved in government to talk about a more contingent set of
political relationships in the absence of the more eternal bonds of grace-based
friendship. In other words, a focus on institutional structures (either in a mixed
or absolutist state) provided a way of talking about political relationships when
the internal bonds of unity had gone, whereby individuals could act for the
state as opposed to a common or greater good which was now contested.
Very much akin to this, within the Irish kingdom a general need to speak about
a set of external political relationships took place in a context where a similar set of
ideas concerning mans internal condition and his capacity to act well had begun
to fall apart. Leaving aside the question of an Irish proto-absolutism at this point,
by generally recasting political relationships as involving the offices and apparatus
of the state, government, it would appear, sought to regulate those relationships
through institutional controls instead of relying on loyalty or fidelity to the prince,
which became problematic if consciences were deemed suspect. More specifically,
by placing limits on office holding and by constructing regional institutions of
government (i.e., provincial presidencies in Ireland) sovereignty would be positioned within state institutions and not necessarily with the gentry community or
within lordships when the wider community was thought unreformed.

Normative Political and Religious Vocabulary

Once, then, the state is seen as responding to a vision of man suspect in conscience, if not fallen, the political space that the state opens up becomes very
different. In other words, what propels a broadly statist model is not a Christian humanist vision of man, who naturally seeks out avenues available for his
own betterment, but a more difficult vision of man born in sin but redeemed

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Introduction

by grace. Here the study of Elizabethan Ireland presents itself as an important

corrective, because of the particular conditions of the island. First, Irish policy
debate exposes the detail of a discussion concerning the nature of man and his
reform, because the primary task of government was to construct a civil society
from the ground up. Secondly, Ireland helps demonstrate how difficult it was
for a sense of modernity and political freedom to emerge from a combination of
protestant thought and early modern state theory.
Quentin Skinner argues that in understanding the ideas of major political
thinkers and philosophers, these thinkers need to be understood as responding to a particular set of historical problems. Political thinkers were not voicing
some universal, timeless, principle, but were responding to contemporaneous
circumstances. Secondly, how individuals spoke about and justified political
action depended upon, or was conditioned by, available normative vocabulary
and ideas, since we can only speak and express ourselves using the vocabulary we
have near at hand. Thus the emergence and development of political thought is
indicative of attempts to push the boundaries of pre-existing vocabulary in order
to articulate a new set of ideas; and by implication these ideas are limited by
normative terminology and by the context in which they emerge.19
In relation to Irish historiography, an awareness of normative political and religious vocabulary demands a significant level of reinterpretation. Irish historians
stress the growing violence and arbitrariness of government, but within a limited
interpretative framework. There is a sense of Irish peculiarity and the colonial,
where the formation of various Irish identities, Old English, Gaelic Irish and New
English, has been understood in terms of the outsider (the colonial newcomer)
who dispossessed the native.20 Alongside this, Rory Rapple and David Edwards
now point to the startling use of martial law and other extra legal measures.21 Here,
however, governments disregard for the due process of law demands an explanation beyond simply arguing that violence became normalized, that the New
English saw the Irish as different and less deserving of rights, or that panic set in.
It is also not sufficient to simply dismiss references to religious reformation
as empty rhetoric, when church reform usually headed government reform programmes, or to dismiss reformation ontology as irrelevant when the idea of
God and Christ were most certainly fundamental to the outlook of all.22 Nor
is it good enough to argue that protestants, on the basis of their theology, simply condemned the Irish as beyond help. Brendan Bradshaw in Sword, Word
and Strategy suggested that Christian humanists in Ireland saw preaching as
effective because they thought mans intellect sufficiently intact; whilst reformed
protestants, seeing a corrupt will overpowering the intellect, discounted preaching and embraced the sword.23 For Bradshaw this meant that those more
radical protestants involved in Irish government simply condemned the Irish
and quickly embraced a more coercive policy. A similar view was adopted by

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Nicholas Canny in both The Elizabethan Conquest (1976) and Making Ireland
British (2003).24 Such a position, however, ignores the fact that an emphasis on
the Fall was universally applicable and that the more important corollary of reformation thought was an emphasis on redemption offered to all. Here Ciaran
Brady and James Murray have also pointed to a disjuncture within Irish history
writing between the recognition that efforts had actually been made to evangelize and the darker political narrative outlined. Although in their attempt at
a corrective they define reformation as simply part and parcel of an attempt to
extend English law throughout the Irish kingdom as mandated by reformation
statute. As a result they too end up ignoring the evangelical motive by treating
religious reformation as a predominately institutional process.25
Instead, we should work from the position that Irish government had to justify
and understand its actions within the confines of English political and religious
ideas. If it stepped beyond what was permitted it had to find a way to justify and
think about such behaviour within that framework (and this was far from straightforward). As Hiram Morgan, and more recently Nicholas Canny, observed,
Ireland may be better understood within a far broader European pattern, where
a similar problem of inter-community violence had to be rationalized, explained
and justified, as opposed to being contextualized as colonial and so different.26
But at a more important level, Ireland, in far broader terms, allows us to move
beyond a focus on political tracts by allowing us to examine shifts in everyday
policy discussion. Not only do we need to understand major political thinkers
as being in dialogue with a set of lesser figures and writers, as Skinner argues, we
need to contextualize shifts in thinking as being part of a far wider exchange of
information and ideas which took place on the ground. For instance, a lot of
policy discussion within the English privy council occurred sole voce, because
those involved in government met in person; whilst in contrast in Ireland the
same type of everyday discussion had to take place in the regular exchange of letters between those in Ireland and the privy council in England. Irish government
correspondence generally consists of various lord deputies, lord presidents and
other minor office holders reporting on the condition of Irish society, sometimes
on a weekly or more regular basis, where the various problems described were
conditioned by the immediate circumstances faced and the breakdown in models for religious and political reform.
Such correspondence allows us, then, to trace incremental shifts in everyday
terminology and to see how practical reality drove the articulation of new ideas.
Actually, if it is considered that there are over 200 volumes of official state papers
dealing with the specific question of Irish government under Elizabeth, which
have been artificially separated from the main body of English state papers, the
presence of quite a significant Irish accent in English thought becomes all too
apparent though English historians tend to see Ireland as somewhat irrelevant.

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Introduction

Furthermore, because of the widespread dysfunction of Irish civil life, in Ireland a whole set of assumptions about man, sin, grace and the good life, which
usually went unspoken, can be seen interacting and informing an attempt to
speak about the state. This suggests that what we see taking place in Ireland has
a far wider European significance. After all, various operative assumptions are
sometimes hard to grasp. When someone writes about the establishment of a
preaching ministry, or the need for reform, they invoke a whole body of unspoken assumptions which lie below those terms. In particular, many protestants
involved in early modern government saw no reason to spell out a set of relationships they assumed to be highly normative, when they wrote or spoke about a
godly vision for society. The same can be said about other aspects of European
government, such as the imposition of English or even civil law.
But then the operative assumptions which lie underneath various concepts
of law tend to be closer to modern thinking. Thus there is not the same disjuncture between past and present operative assumptions. It is also the case that many
political thinkers focused on institutional structures in order to avoid discussing
the very problematic relationships that such a focus on institutions was meant to
solve. They discussed customary rights or the limits on office holding, instead of
a contested view of the nature of man, and an unsettling breakdown in trust, in
order to make sense of fractured relationships. Thus the wider theological context,
in many instances, is purposefully obfuscated. In Ireland, however, the near total
dysfunction of the Elizabethan church, where Gods word had not been widely
preached, as well as the continued failure to resolve this problem, meant that the
position of Gods word in the reform of society became contested to such a degree
that exactly how Gods word was thought to operate had to be discussed. Alongside this, the continued breakdown in political conditions, the crisis that resulted
from perceived widespread civil disobedience, also meant that the nature of those
relationships had to be directly critiqued. In effect Ireland draws out a whole set
of ideas which remained unstated, and what we see in Ireland has implications for
the way we view English and European Protestantism and the manner in which
protestants came to conceive of the godly polity and subsequently the state.

Re-interpreting State Theory

After all, within other European political communities there are indications that
a particularly godly if not Calvinist dimension did form part of protestant resistance writing. Martin van Gelderen, in his account of the political thought of the
Dutch revolt, points to a conscience-based argument for resistance, which sat
below a broader constitutionalist position. Dutch writers drew a link between the
health of an individuals conscience and the moral rectitude of acting to defend
the traditional rights and privileges of the Netherlands.27 Anne McLaren has also
drawn attention to the way in which godly conscience or the disposition of Eliza-

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Calvinism, Reform and the Absolutist State in Elizabethan Ireland

beths protestant councillors was equated with political virtue. This, it was argued,
would compensate for the natural deficiencies of Elizabeth as a female prince. For
McLaren this represented an attempt to repackage the resistance arguments used
against the rule of Mary Tudor as an argument in favour of godly female rule.28
These positions would lead to a shift in focus onto state structures, and as
before this is suggestive of a need to find a different model for the community.
For example, van Gelderen notes that Dutch writers equated traditional or customary rights with calls for freedom of conscience in order to unite a religiously
fragmented polity in opposition to tyrannical Spanish rule. The objective of political action was not the furthering of religious reformation but the need to maintain
traditional state institutions in the Netherlands as a means of regulating and preserving customary rights.29 There is a sense of negative freedom here, whereby
those institutions act as an external check on an individuals behaviour, therefore
protecting the rights and liberties of every citizen and allowing some level of freedom of worship. This contrasts with an idea of positive freedom associated with a
unified Christian community, whereby the action of grace frees an individual internally from sin, and in being free every godly citizen will act in the same godly way.30
A similar pattern can also be identified with regard to French absolutist thinking, although the confessional context was very different. Mack P. Holt, writing of
the French Wars of Religion, points to the unmaking of the French body politic
as the Galician church, which was synonymous with the French political community, became fractured, and it was within this context that the catholic Bodin in his
Six Books outlined an absolutist notion of state authority.31 As mentioned, Bodin
defined sovereign authority as an absolute and perpetual power and argued that
such authority was located with a particular estate in society.32 This was meant to
provide a point of political action and unity which sat above confessional division,
as well as undermining the arguments of Huguenot resistance writers.33
But what remains in play in these various accounts is an emphasis on a more
strictly secular political sphere, where confessional division and the problem of
conscience drives or compels the emergence of a modern political space. There
is a clear sense of early modernity where man can act as a political figure or a
politique without the question of confession simply stymieing any possibility of
his participation in political life either in the freer context of the Netherlands,
where a concept of individual liberty emerged, or in the narrower confines of
absolutist France. In contrast, what Ireland helps demonstrate is the extent to
which such emerging institutions remained conditioned by notions of sin and
a concern over the absence of grace. Thus whilst state institutions, in whatever
form, may have been designed to open up and regulate a more secular political
space, paradoxically their meaning and purpose remained defined by a preceding
Christian model of the community, where state institutions sought to remake
relationships that in the absence of Christian friendship were in many ways
unwanted and conditioned by a sense of distrust.

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11

This becomes more apparent if shifts in Irish thinking are read against a more
tentative shift in thought and outlook identified in England by John Guy and
latterly by Anne McLaren. Guy writes of Elizabeths two reigns, where an early
sense of protestant collegiately within the English privy council gave way to a
more arbitrary style of government. By the late 1580s an ageing Elizabeth and
an inner circle, which included Lord Burghley and a new archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift, sought to impose their will from above whilst denying the
claims of various catholic and protestant parties that they had a constitutional or
customary right to a voice in government.34 Building on this, McLaren not only
points to an initial grace-based model, she hints that the failure of this model,
which arose out of the fracturing of that community (into episcopal, puritan and
catholic outlooks) was instrumental in encouraging a less collegiate and more
absolutist style of government.35 It is here that we return to the question of Irish
proto-absolutism and its more tentative English twin.
Again part of the difficulty in finding a satisfactory explanation as to why a
set of English protestants could embrace such an absolutist position stems from
the way in which such a shift in thought tends to be contextualized. Whilst Collinson saw the monarchical republic as expressing a level of godly intent, for
Collinson what drove a protestant English interest in mixed polity thinking was
simply their need for a voice in government so they could argue for more religious reform. In many ways, the more radical English protestant grabbed a set
of established political ideas in order to argue for the dissemination of Gods
word and the reform of the liturgy of the church, but an idea of a godly England
(reformed in conscience) did not really change how the protestant Englishman
thought of those political relationships. Building on this, for Stephen Alford,
what motivated or informed protestant collegiality under William Cecil was
the threat posed by Mary Queen of Scots, which bound protestant councillors
together, as well as an earlier conciliarist tradition which had developed due to
the minority rule of Edward VI. With the execution of Mary Queen of Scots,
and the appointment of a second generation of privy councillors, such collegiality, it is suggested, waned. 36 Thus religious thinking may have informed the
political but it did not alter what it meant. What Ireland reveals, however,
because of the nature of the policy debate, is the sheer extent to which something more fundamental was in play, where the political actually did come to be
redefined by religious thought and motivation.
The various underlying assumptions identified in Ireland can be found in
parallel in England though Englands more settled condition meant they
were not as pronounced. Here, I would argue, that the end of an emphasis on
the mixed polity was not simply about a change in political circumstances, but
was also informed by a notion of Christian unity based on word, grace and
conscience. Here the end of the viability of the mixed polity arose (around the
1580s) because of the fact that word and grace were actually thought absent and

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Calvinism, Reform and the Absolutist State in Elizabethan Ireland

so the godly relationships which informed a notion of active virtue and a level of
political equality fell apart. What drove proto-absolutism, then, was the emerging invalidity of the preceding model, which suggested an alternative non-godly
political order was required. Proto-absolutism allowed dysfunctional political relationships to be regulated by excluding (at least temporarily) those not
thought to be godly or of right behaviour from political life.
In this way civic republicanism, when the godly community was absent,
quickly became absolutism, and to understand this shift in thought in England
these ideas need to be contextualized beside a more open and explicit discussion
of underlying assumptions found in Ireland.37 We might even suggest that in the
various contexts where mixed monarchy remained valid, there is also a need to
draw a distinction between a mixed polity, where custom and trust governed
relationships, and a mixed state, where a more defined institutional conception
of the distribution of authority took over, very much akin to an absolutist turn
in thinking.

Commonwealth, Grace and the State

The study, then, will trace the shifting use of terminology within Irish government
correspondence. Chapter 1 examines initial moves away from an earlier commonwealth model, which assumed man capable of furthering his own reform,
in addition to the emergence of quite a blunt definition of basic civil obedience
as being reliant on the threat of government violence. Alongside this the chapter
examines the initial emergence of a protestant redefinition of political relationships which was denoted by the vocabulary of true obedience. Here an inversion
of protestant resistance theory took place. In the context of ungodly rule protestants equated true obedience to God with acts of civil disobedience. In Ireland,
however, true obedience was equated with long-term civil obedience.
Chapters 1 and 2 also explore the political implications of this position,
in light of a failure to establish a functional preaching ministry and the connection drawn between the dissemination of Gods word, the action of grace
on conscience and a long-term civil obedience. This sat beside an increasingly
evident counter-reformation note in Irish rebellion (in particular in the second
Desmond rebellion of 1579 and the Nugent and Baltinglass risings in the Pale of
1580). Here a series of strained references to a notion of true obedience can be
identified in the letters of Lord Deputy Henry Sidney, Lord Deputy Arthur Grey
and Archbishop John Long , amongst others. Critically, a godly model had not
been implemented, and thus it had not been tested, meaning that any new way
of thinking about political relationships and political stability remained caught
within a godly frame. Within both these chapters the various ideas identified in
Ireland will be read against a parallel and more muted discussion in England.

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Introduction

13

Chapter 3 considers the initial deployment of a non-godly vocabulary of the

statewhich tended to be broadly absolutist in character. The chapter concentrates on Irish constitutional peculiarity, which primed Irish policy debate so
an emerging notion of the state was near at hand. Here the study examines how
geographical distance from the person of the prince, along with the perceived
corruption of the wider community, encouraged government to think of sovereign authority as distinct from the person of the prince and a corrupt Irish polity
thus encouraging a level of double abstraction. Beside this a diminished sense of
lse majest, which arose because of Elizabeths physical absence from the island,
meant the various constitutional assumptions made tended to be openly examined, whilst constant references to the state or condition of the island meant the
material for an easy linguistic shift could be grabbed. The confidence of the Old
English community was also critical in the critique which emerged.
Chapters 4 and 5 explore how the notion of the state was deployed in Ireland
as a means of articulating an alternative non-godly model for political action and
the wider political community. Here the study begins to address a particularly pertinent question. Why did a set of English reformed protestants in Ireland deploy
the language of an abstract and absolutist state, when such a position in continental Europe was used to deny their protestant or Calvinist associates not only a right
to a voice in government, but the possibility of freedom of worship? An important figure in this respect is Philip Sidney, the son of the Irish Lord Deputy Henry
Sidney, who defended his fathers absolutist interpretation of crown prerogative
powers and deployed an emerging language of the state in the Anjou marriage
debate in England. Once again events in Ireland are paralleled in England, though
it is in the Irish kingdom that these ideas are given early and advanced form and
that the full context surrounding their development is laid bare.
Also important is Geoffrey Fenton who translated a large body of European
religious and political thought and served as Irish secretary of state. Of particular interest in chapter 4 is the way in which the phrase broken state was used by
Fenton and others to refer to contingent, sinful and unstable political relationships, which then slide into references to the state to denote the institutions of
government and the exclusion of the wider community from participation in
political life (especially the Old English of the Pale).
Chapter 5 gives an account of the manner in which the notion of the state
also framed the more general re-organization of political relationships in Ireland.
At one level, an idea of political contingency or fortuna broadened out, and mans
internal passions and appetites, his physical desires and reactions, became the
subject of attention. Some individuals involved in government began to think of
the way in which the natural body might react in a disordered world and in turn
how man might be trained through custom and habit to act well in the absence
of a grace based internal reform. Beside this, there was an attempt to deconstruct

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Calvinism, Reform and the Absolutist State in Elizabethan Ireland

lordships and the position of the freeholder altered in the perceived absence of a
viable gentry community. The freeholder was not necessarily to serve the commonwealth through active participation in political life, but he became more a
structural component of the institutional state helping in the atomization of society and the positioning of political authority in state institutions (and its removal
from great lordships). With the earl of Tyrone, Hugh ONeill, the components of
an alternative catholic body political and state can also be identified.
Finally, chapter 6 gives an account of the emergence of an Irish language of the
state in John Hookers contribution to the Irish section of the second edition of
Holinsheds Chronicles (1587), as well as in Richard Beacons Solon his Follie (1594)
and Edmund Spensers A View of the Present State of Ireland (1597). With Hooker
a marked contrast between an earlier protestant mixed polity view and an absolutist position emerges. Hooker details in many respects a version of the narrative
that this book traces, where a certain amount of emphasis is placed on the fact
that consciences in Ireland are corrupt which conditions his assertion that the Irish
community does not have the right to question the crowns prerogative powers.
With Beacon and Spenser, however, something more significant takes place.
On the one hand a slightly more institutional sense of the state is set out. But alongside this, with the separation of the state from the polity a space opens up for the
re-conception of the political community which exists below the state and its institutions. Here the polity starts to be thought of as a natural body with passions and
appetites, formed by custom and habit, as opposed to the body of Christ bound by
grace. Nevertheless, the critical point remains that the terminology associated with
a natural body simply provided a different, slightly more productive, way of discussing sin and its political implications. The state in Ireland remained conditioned
by a failure to construct a redeemed and reformed political community.

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